[we have previously been using "MIT-style" and "BSD-style" licensing in this thread for the most part -- given the poster who suggested that Apache makes more sense these days, I'm switching to that terminology]
In article <99386b28-1636-4f81-beec-3756970d3...@11g2000prv.googlegroups.com>, Carl Banks <pavlovevide...@gmail.com> wrote: > >You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed >source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other >open source licenses. That I completely disagree with. I'm not going to bother making arguments (Paul Boddie et al has done a much better job than I could), but I wanted to register my disagreement as someone who generally prefers Apache-style licenses. I will just add that I believe that Apache-style licensing could not work in the absence of GPL software. IOW, I believe that GPL confers a form of herd immunity to Open Source in general, and Stallman gets full credit for creating the idea of GPL to protect Open Source. I believe that Stallman understands this perfectly well and it in part represents why he is so opposed to non-GPL licensing; it makes sense that he feels some resentment toward the "freeloading" from the rest of the Open Source community. OTOH, I also believe that having only GPL would destroy Open Source as a viable development environment and community; it's too restrictive for some very valuable projects (including Python in specific, to bring this back on topic). Each project needs to think carefully about its relationship to the Open Source ecosystem and community before deciding on a license. But for small projects trying to get users, defaulting to Apache makes sense. -- Aahz (a...@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n nx prgrmmng. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
